Guiding Latinos Into the Tech World: Carolina Huaranca

As one of the nation’s few Latina venture capitalists, Carolina Huaranca, Principal at Kapor Capital, is blazing paths and making sure the door stays wide open for other Latinos to enter into the tech world alongside her. Between her work at Kapor Capital and her time spent empowering her own community, Huaranca is stopping at nothing to create a more diverse and inclusive Silicon Valley.

I give because I want to be a voice for the voiceless. I want to provide access.

She credits her parents for having prioritized giving and education as tools for success. Before emigrating from Peru to a NY suburb, her father conducted a zip code analysis to identify the best public schools in NY and based his decision on where to live and work based on accessibility to a quality education for his children. Huaranca eventually graduated from Cornell University and began her career as a Mergers & Acquisitions investment banker.

“Because of my parents, my North Star has always been about giving disenfranchised communities access and opportunity. This has been reflected in the jobs I’ve chosen; I’ve strived to have this reflected throughout my career,” she said. Huaranca eventually left Wall Street and helped launch one of the nation’s highest performing charter school networks.

She sees herself very much aligned with Hispanics in Philanthropy’s mission and focus of strengthening Latino leadership, voice, and equity. Just as HIP has sought to do this across the Americas, Huaranca has honed in on doing this in Silicon Valley.

In her unique role as a Latina venture capitalist, Huaranca also makes herself accessible to entrepreneurs who don’t have networks. She hosts office hours to coach would be Latino/a entrepreneurs on how to navigate the fundraising process so they can compete with other more networked entrepreneurs. Huaranca wants to see more Latino/as generate wealth for themselves and their families and she sees generational wealth being created in tech.

I hope to inspire others to give by leading by example and showing that one’s time and energy is just as valuable as a dollar amount.

Huaranca has provided mentorship and opportunity to underrepresented youth of color through the SMASH Academy, an intensive Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) college preparatory program. Along with this, in what she describes as one of her proudest accomplishments of 2016, Huaranca helped co-organize Startup Weekend: Latinx Tech Edition, sponsored by the Kapor Center for Social Impact. The event provided aspiring Latino entrepreneurs the platform to design innovative tech-based solutions to problems affecting their communities and allowed them to see themselves in a space that is often unwelcoming.

Just as Huaranca, who was a founder of Spriggle, an edtech company, has been able to benefit from her parents’ generosity, she hopes to create opportunities for Latinas and Latinos today and into the future.

We learn the stories of struggle and triumph and with each generation, we give back to try and make it easier for the next generation to achieve its goals.